In the following book excerpt, Noah Richler argues that few Canadians have been affected by 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan:

“You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it,” warned Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006, the harbinger of his boast the elevation of the role of the Canadian Forces. The binding mortar of the new Canada that replaced the old was provided by its cult of the hero and a larger and more prominent military, and a discipline that extended to a terse intolerance of dissent voiced by unruly parts at home. If, as Christie Blatchford notes her book Fifteen Days, it had once been the case that troops were instructed not to create controversy by wearing their uniforms in public, now the opposite was true. Uniforms were a source of pride. The commemorations and rituals that invoked the role of the Forces and ordinary citizens’ debt to them were conducted with panache, Remembrance Day most of all, and soon the presence of a soldier would be made formally a mainstay at the oath-taking ceremonies of new citizens.

Prior episodes of combat provide a romantic link to the country as it is imagined to have been, though not necessarily as it was. The correlation of Canadian wars promotes, through remembrance of various kinds, a nostalgic and highly politicized view of the country in which “knowledge” of our history functions as the literary romance does. The romance, the precursor of the novel, is the yearning of a society for a version of itself that it knows is no longer viable and is on the wane. It is the last look back, the protest and lament of a portion of society aware that the world is relentlessly moving forward and, in effect, forgetting it. The link between the war in Afghanistan and prior Canadian wars as the Conservative lobby maintains it is both mired in nostalgia for a Canada that is long past (the government’s obsession with things Royal another symptom of this) and a foot in the sand against the tide of an ineluctable future rolling in. The Conservative stance is epic in its wariness, bigoted in its aspiration and fictive in its details.

Take, for instance, the claim that our effort in Afghanistan meant that “Canada’s military was at war, and it was at war in ways the whole country could see and feel,” seemingly buttressed by much vaunted phenomena such as the naming of the Highway of Heroes and its being lined by Canadians wanting to pay tribute to the war dead. To suggest that the war was keenly felt in Canada — or even that it would be in the event, say, of a terrorist bombing such as occurred in London in July 2005, in Mumbai, India, twice since 9/11 or as backfired in Stockholm, Sweden, in December 2010 — is disingenuous, a misrepresentation of the peaceful reality of the country and of its heterogeneous nature, the suppression of both these traits having allowed the epic version of the country to persist.

It is also an assessment that is belied by numbers.

The Canadian Forces suffered, through 2010, the highest casualty and fatality ratio among member states of the ISAF coalition, and yet it simply has not been the case that the “whole country” was seeing and feeling the war. The 55,173 Canadian soldiers who, by July 2011, had served in Afghanistan, their families, loved ones and the greater circle in their acquaintance and a minority for whom the war has struck a jarring or patriotic chord were affected directly. But the more dramatic assertion, while it may be a fair reflection of anxiety about just how far the conflict might have escalated, is a self-aggrandizing fantasy that has relied on the comparison with previous wars to portray the country in a flattering light. A simple numerical analysis of the portion of the population that can claim to be legitimately affected by each of the conflicts shows the extent of the lie that we are living when we pretend that the “whole country” sees and feels the war. The lie operates very usefully on a variety of levels: it has allowed Canadian politicians and civic leaders to make grandiose statements about the country’s international standing, it has facilitated a reorganization of the domestic social order along the hierarchical lines that epic thinking encourages and requires and it has permitted innumerable Canadians to believe that we “support our troops” because, on the public face of it, we have easily been able to convince ourselves that we are in fact involved.

But the notion of our involvement is an illusion, as any glance about the streets and restaurants of Canadian cities over the last 10 years will have shown. Beyond that immediate circle of the 55,173 and of the 157 military and four civilians who lost their lives in Afghanistan prior to the exit of combat forces in July 2011 (and one more soldier who, by time of writing, died during the Canadian Forces’ subsequent training role in Kabul); beyond Canada’s military bases and their bedroom communities; beyond the faithful watching over the Highway of Heroes and others who have demonstrated their concern by withholding unequivocal support, the war has not even slightly been felt by Canadians other than as that flattering, self-aggrandizing idea.

During the First World War, 644,636 Canadians put on the uniform — a number that amounted to just under 8% of the population of 8,148,000. Some 418,000 served overseas, more than 65,000 were killed and 172,950 were wounded. During the Second World War, 1,081,865 Canadians — just under 9% of the population of 12,072,000 in 1945 — put on the uniform, 545,000 served overseas, more than 47,000 were killed and 54,414 were wounded. In the 10 years of the war in Afghanistan and its tapering denouement, approximately 65,000 Canadians and 25,000 in the reserves wore the uniform, of which a little more than 55,000 served overseas. The number of enlisted works out to fractionally more than a quarter of 1% of an estimated population, in 2011, of 34,278,400. If we assume that the life of a soldier touches another, then just a bit more than one-half of 1% can claim to have been intimately affected by the war in Afghanistan, versus approximately 18% in the World Wars. If, however, we assume that the life of a soldier is intertwined with four others — two parents, a spouse and a child or a friend, say — then the portion of the population intimately affected by the war in Afghanistan is still only fractionally above 1% versus just under half of the population during the Second World War and 40% of it in the First.

This overwhelming disparity does not even take into account either the length of the wars being compared (the First and Second World Wars involved not only a much greater number, but a greater number over roughly half the time, proportionately augmenting those conflicts’ intensities) or the multiplying effect of each era’s patterns of migration. Family and community ties will have meant that the general Canadian population far more intimately related to the people in the European countries that constituted the actual theatre of war in 1914-18, when half the Canadian Army was British-born, and 1939-45, than is the present one with Afghans and Iraqis, diminishing the claim that the “whole country” sees and feels the war yet again

In Canada, the upholding of the fiction of our being a nation at war (fighting the war may mean that the whole nation risks becoming a target, but that is not the same thing) has allowed the Canadian government to pretend, as previous ones have done for more than a century, that the country will be the recipient of special consideration and favours from its partners in alliance and empire. It has done so with little effect, when plotting a genuinely independent course, one that might well have been alternate, is likely to have garnered as much notice and respect. Every bona fide war effort requires its older men fighting the war in their heads and hollering, “Charge!” from the safety of the back, and in Canada and the war in Afghanistan, the situation has been no different. The lie has allowed a particularly strident part of the establishment to argue that death and injury are the “price” to be paid for “freedom,” for “security,” that catch-all word, and that the war (when it is called a war) is “just.” It is not only an example of the good fight that Canadians historically embrace, but of combat as the defining national characteristic that supersedes all others. This constant misrepresentation of the polity is evident in the numerous accounts of “lessons drawn from Afghanistan” in which the assertion of Canadians having acquitted themselves as formidable soldiers, as worthy partners in the ISAF alliance, takes precedence over any more contrary information about the war. The heroic story is sufficient. It completes itself.

And yet, if the subversion of the peacekeeping myth by the war-fighting one has been able to take place, it is exactly because the war has not been more generally felt. The small number of casualties and deaths, no less traumatic to the affected because of their relative paucity, is one reason the war is one that most Canadians do not “see and feel” much more than as an experience of free theatre in which, knowing no harm, the play’s resolution is more or less guaranteed to be a happy one. The absence of any form of conscription, the most obvious antidote to the country’s generally negligible involvement, is a much bigger reason. Said the American essayist William Deresiewicz to West Point: “Now, instead of sharing the burden, we sentimentalize it.” Virtually is how, in the privileged remove of the West, almost all emotional phenomena now occur, and in the absence of being one or two people away from the trauma of battle, the way most Canadians see and feel the war was always bound to be second-hand and received from the movies, television and radio shows such as Combat Hospital and Afghanada, and video and “news” games. The narcissistic entertainments of modern communications substitute for actual involvement, the length and breadth of society. Outside of the real experience of the approximately 90,000 members of the Canadian Forces and their families, the war was never much more, in Canada, than a received idea depending upon a stock of clichéd emotions routinely relied upon by government and commercially exploited by purveyors of mass-market media. Eviscerated of meaning, the pretense of our involvement in the war prompts a collection of reactions that are cued like clockwork: support, honour, shock, remembrance, regret et cetera.

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